20 Years Since Lear Crash

Fatal Accidents A Rarity At Bradley

June 04, 2004|By PAUL MARKS; Courant Staff Writer

To this day, no one knows exactly why, 20 years ago, a Learjet's normal landing approach to Bradley International Airport became a catastrophe, leaving the plane in pieces and in flames and three people dead.

The ``how'' of the June 4, 1984, crash -- the most recent fatal accident at the airfield -- is well understood.

Two hundred feet up and seconds from touching down on Runway 33, the National Transportation Safety Board found, the twin-engine jet increased thrust and veered to the right in what some witnesses took to be an apparent effort to rise and circle the field. But the sudden bank to the right increased until the plane's wings were almost vertical to the ground.

The doomed pilot worked the left aileron trim control, struggling to balance the wings, the post-crash investigation found.

Fatal accidents are extremely rare at Bradley -- something ``impressive'' for a mid-sized airport that today has about 90,000 annual takeoffs and landings, said Jeff Guzzetti, deputy director for Northeast regional operations in the NTSB's office of aviation safety.

Michael Cassano of Enfield, who worked as a cargo agent at Bradley, said he had stepped out into the steamy night air for a break on the night of the crash. He recalls seeing the descending lights of the plane pass over Route 75 and hearing the odd "swirling sound" of the Learjet 23A's straining engines.

Cassano looked away, then was startled by a muffled thud. He looked back and saw a fireball erupt. The jet, inbound from the southeast, had veered off course and crashed.

``I was in disbelief,'' he said.

Instead of climbing, the Air Continental jet, arriving from Syracuse, N.Y., with more than 100,000 canceled checks for Hartford-area banks, had dropped its nose and struck the ground just outside the airfield fence. Instantly killed were pilot Charles Huffman and co-pilot Ronald Dulay, both of Ohio, and a passenger, Elldridge Sheetz of Indiana.

Firetrucks from the Bradley fire station, which was only a block away, rushed to the scene, spraying the wreckage even as they rolled up. The fire was quickly put out, but the shattered Learjet and the remains of its occupants lay in place for about 24 hours while the site was examined.

Investigators found that, inexplicably, the ``spoilers'' on the back edge of the wings had not activated properly. Those mechanisms -- so-called because they disrupt airflow and ``spoil'' the lift of the wings just before landing -- normally are raised together. In this case, the left spoiler remained retracted.

``They're not set up to be activated like that,'' said William Palmer, who was assistant airport administrator at Bradley on the night of the crash. ``The spoilers did not activate symmetrically, and that caused the airplane to roll -- in other words, to flip right over.''

NTSB investigators reached a similar conclusion. ``With only the right spoiler extended the aircraft would have a tendency to roll to the right'' because the right wing would lose lift, their report released almost four months after the crash says. ``This could possibly explain the position of the left [aileron] trim by offsetting the rolling motion to the right caused by the extended right spoiler.''

Guzzetti said no one ever explained why the right spoiler activated and the left one did not.

It is impossible to know whether that resulted from a deliberate or careless action of the pilot, he said. He called it ``very unnatural'' for a plane nearing a landing: ``When you're making an approach like this, you do not want big movements of the airplane.'' The wind of 8 knots from almost due west, a slight crosswind, would not have explained it, Guzzetti added.

The genesis of the fatal failure -- whether it was a defect in the plane's flight-control systems or a pilot error -- eluded investigators. Huffman and Dulay had flown into Bradley hundreds of times over the previous 18 months, and the 18-year-old Learjet had the best maintenance record of four such planes used by now-defunct Air Continental Inc. of Elyria, Ohio.

Guzzetti said such an anomaly had not occurred in other Learjets. The NTSB frequently issues an inspection order or maintenance recommendation to airlines or manufacturers as a result of its investigations, but in the case of the Bradley crash it did not.

The fatal accident at Bradley previous to the 1984 Learjet crash was in 1962, when a faulty service door in a twin-engine Convair 440 airliner operated by Allegheny Airlines flew open as the plane descended toward the airfield and a flight attendant was sucked out by the sudden decompression. The body of 29-year-old Francoise DeMoriere was found on some railroad tracks in Farmington.